Shadow Complex Preview

Metroid-style hotness from the makers of Undertow.

You're reading an E3 2009 preview, which we've broken into three sections to make it easy to sift through during this week of convention madness. Check out E3.1UP.COM for all (meaning words, screens, and videos) of our E3 2009 coverage.

What's the game about? Based on the world presented in Orson Scott Card's novel Empire, where present-day America faces imminent civil war, Shadow Complex focuses on a young couple away on a camping trip. When the Nathan Drake look-alike hero goes off to fetch a backpack that rolled off a ledge, he finds an underground cavern leading to an ominous (some may say shadowy) complex. Then he finds out that in his short absence, the scary, armored soldiers who work there have have kidnapped his girlfriend. What follows is an adventure through the facility, mixed with equal parts stealth and action. The humongous area maps and the game's 2D plane illicit a strong comparison to the original Metroid games, which becomes even more evident as the hero gains new weapons and increasingly enhanced power-armor.

Click the image above to check out all Shadow Complex screens.

What's new for E3? After a long time speculating about what Chair was making post-Undertow, Shadow Complex makes it debut at E3. Although Chair is now part of Epic Games, Microsoft Game Studios will publish Shadow Complex, and it's one of the publisher's showpiece Live Arcade games at the expo.

What's our take? If you wished that the first-person Metroid Prime series had a traditional 2D treatment, Shadow Complex might be a suitable consolation. It mixes sci-fi trappings with the same satisfying gameplay that made those first Metroid games so great, while adding some new wrinkles. The gunplay is, expectedly, a little bit more like a Western third-person shooter, albeit in 2D (though at times you can fire at enemies in the background). But Shadow Comples is indisputably a "Metroidvania," with the aforementioned incremental upgrades and a regular stream of boss encounters both big and small.

Unreal Engine 3 makes Shadow Complex look nice, and not just "for an XBLA game." We saw a lot of the game, but didn't get to play much -- still, it's shaping up to be one of 2009's premier Live titles. Chair's sitting on something good here.

Comments (6)

The familiarity that everybody feels...

is because this game looks and looks like it plays just like Undertow. The trailer for the game showed a lot of cut scenes, but when you actually look at the action of the game it looks like a new skin to the last game that they made. I thought Undertow was a fair game, but I am glad that I got it free. If I would have played it as a demo, I would have left it at that.

Looks promising

might be good

I think it's too much to claim it doesn't show any potential, but I have to wonder how well the Metroidvania formula will work without any of the associated atmosphere. Maybe what we've seen so far is misleading, but this game has the blandest art direction possible. If it's really just Soldier Guy running around Contra-style jungle military complex, the game better have some other tricks up its sleeve.

Uh uh.

Honestly, I feel like the environments were way too small for the characters and enemies in the game, and it really did seem to shamelessly ape Metroid and new-school Castlevania while incorporating bland gunplay. Basically, it didn't seem like the developers had any real innovation for the formula. I'd like to be proven wrong, but I saw absolutely nothing that suggested potential.